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Ask HN: Is a system for single character responses to emails a bad idea?

2 points by pjbrow ↗ HN
Lately, I’ve been using a single character to respond to a lot of emails. I get through emails much faster (especially on my mobile), and the sender gets useful info back quickly. For example, if I get an email asking for something and I won't get to it until the day after tomorrow, I’ll respond like this:

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2

The text above represents a response below. I apologise if this seems rude - I'm taking this approach to make sure I get back to everyone quickly (http://patbrown.org/pointmail.html).

1 - I’ll get back to you within 1 day.

2 - I’ll get back to you within 2 days.

[Higher numbers mean the same as above…]

t - thanks, I’ll look into it but I’m not sure how long it'll take.

n - No / No thank you - I appreciate your message though.

y - Yes / Yes please, that would be great.

s - Sorry, I’ve read your email, but it’s highly unlikely that I’ll be able to fit this in.

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The drawback of this approach is that it comes across as douchey to a high percentage of people. Is the approach irredeemably weird / off-putting? Any ideas on how to dial down the douche factor while maintaining the benefits?

If it’s viable:

- Would two character responses for finer grained meaning work better? For instance, “c1” could mean “It’ll be complete in 1 day” and “w1” would mean “Will get back to you on the below within one day”; and

- What other codes / messages do you think would be important to include?

4 comments

[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 18.6 ms ] thread
detaro
> Any ideas on how to dial down the douche factor while maintaining the benefits?

Using something that replaces the letter with the matching text snippet?

pjbrow
I was considering this out the outset, but one of the benefits of sending responses this way is that other people I work with have started to use it (which they wouldn't if it appeared as a snippet).
davelnewton
Do both.

I used to embed tags in emails, e.g., will-reply:2d and silly stuff like that for two reasons:

1) Keyboard macros could expand it into human-readable text (but leave the tag) and

2) The email client I used at the time made it easy to hang functionality off of email content so I could automate stuff like issue and time tracking etc. based on email tags.

brudgers
Igonring the social dimensions.

From an information theory perspective, the lack of redundancy may be problematic, particularly if email is a noisy channel. Because hitting send writes to "permanent storage", typos "are forever"...and correcting them adds noise.

For example, I accidentally send "1w" when I meant "w1" versus "Will get bcak to you in one day."